Music

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Thanksgiving. After the past year of tumult, anger and
divisiveness we’ve experienced in this country and around the world, to say
nothing of the past couple of weeks, the concepts of thankfulness and
appreciation may seem somewhat more distant and difficult to access than they
might otherwise normally be. At any rate, Thanksgiving Day itself seems of late
to be more about gorging on gigantic meals and, more distressingly, rampant
consumerism, as Black Friday ever threatens to overtake the spirit of the day,
and even the day itself—how many more seasons before it officially becomes
Black Thursday?

Yet here we are, a few days before that very American occasion
inspired by the desire to show our gratitude for our many blessings. So in the
hope of reclaiming some of the original intent of our national holiday, I’d
like to send out some brief thoughts on a few of the things I’m most grateful
for as Thanksgiving Day draws near. Some of them may seem obvious, or even
trivial or silly, but they’re all on my mind and my heart right now, the things
that have made my life richer, more interesting, happier. I don’t need an
official day to acknowledge them, but since I have one, here’s a list of a few
of the things I’m thankful for as the trying and terrible year of 2016 comes to
a close, in no particular order of significance.

I’m grateful for the fact that Vin Scully, the Hall of Fame announcer who retired this year after
calling 67 seasons of Dodgers baseball, will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and while that honor still retains any meaning. Just
last week Scully won the MLB Call of the Year award for his description of the walk-off home run, hit by
Dodger journeyman Charlie Culbertson, which sealed the team’s fourth-straight
National League division win. I’m grateful not only for the memories conjured
by Scully over the years, but also for the privilege of being able to be at
some of the games he called, even listening to him on the radio I brought with
me into the stadium, and for being able to be there on his last weekend at Dodger
Stadium for Vin Scully Appreciation Night, to see him get the love and honor he so richly
deserved.

************

I’m grateful for Rio Bravo, a movie film critic
Charles Taylor recently described as a movie "in which people who have been undervalued come
together to defeat a murderous thug who believes his power gives him the right
to ignore the law." He wrote that early on Election Day, imagining, as
many of us did, the result of the voting would be somewhat different than it
ended up.

************

I’m
grateful for Filmstruck, the brand-new streaming channel for film lovers created
through a collaboration between Turner Classic Movies and the Criterion
Collection. Criterion’s entire streaming library will be available, as well as
new titles premiering every week and a rotating schedule of programs curated by
the likes of the eminent and surpassingly intelligent film critic Michael
Sragow. And speaking of TCM, I’m
grateful that, after three or so years in the wilderness, I’m finally able to
afford to have that essential channel back on my big screen at home. The DVR is
already feeling the strain.

**************

I’m
grateful for the continuing opportunities for movie fans in cities like New
York, Chicago, Austin, Los Angeles, and anywhere it might be happening, to see
revival, repertory, alternative cinema on the big screen. May we here in Los
Angeles never take for granted the American Cinematheque (at the Egyptian and Aero Theaters), the New
Beverly Cinema, the Cinefamily and the Art Theater in Long Beach, as well as
the multiple chances we have to attend and support rich and broadly scaled
festivals year round. Just one treat coming next month: the 40th
anniversary screening of the 1976 King
Kong is coming to the Aero on December 10, with a discussion featuring
legendary makeup artist Rick Baker, the movie’s cinematographer Richard Kline
and others, moderated by the creator of Chucky the Killer Doll, writer-director
Don Mancini.

**************

I’m
grateful for Johnny Cash and June Carter’s recording of “If I Were a Carpenter.”

**************

I’m
grateful for Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage to Italy, probably the
most encyclopedic and insightful documentary we’re ever going to get on the
vast influence and history of Italian film. I’m currently trying to learn Italian
(my daughter and I are taking a class together), and I can’t wait to dig into
this director’s very personal enthusiasms once again, as a way of enriching my
own experience with the language.

**************

I’m
grateful for Shelley Duvall, God bless her, for Suzanne, for
Ida Coyle, for Keechie and L.A. Joan and Mrs. Grover Cleveland, for Pam (Alvy
Singer’s Dylan-obsessed date), for Millie Lamoreaux and Wendy Torrance and,
most especially, for Olive Oyl. May she get the medical treatment she needs,
and the respectful treatment at the hands of the media she deserves.

**************

I’m
grateful for the impulse to turn away from the usual outlets of alarm and
cynicism on talk radio, and the incessant “analysis” of 24-hour TV news, and
spend some time with Ernestine Anderson and Charlie Parker and Count Basie and the
like on KJazz 88.1 FMwhile I’m in my car. I turned it on a few days ago as was treated to John
Williams’ “Swing, Swing, Swing,” from his soaring and brilliant 1941score—this is the tune played
during the movie’s justly celebrated USO dance sequence. Any radio station
which plays that without being asked
gets my tune-in.

*************

I’m
grateful for the Hammer, perhaps my favorite pizza ever, at Track Town Pizza in Eugene, Oregon. It’s not the reason I come to visit my old
University of Oregon hometown, but when I’m there a stop at this joint has
become absolutely required.

*************

I’m grateful for The Vista Theater in East Hollywood.
It’s been at the intersection of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards for around for
80 years or so, on or near the sites where some of the first and greatest
silent films in Hollywood history (Intolerance,
anyone?) were made. These days just about every big-ass blockbuster on the
schedule gets at least a week’s play here, which means my daughters and I end
up here a lot, in our favorite seats-- center, a third of the auditorium back
from the screen. Some of the best sound and picture in the city, a beautifully
maintained art deco interior (Egyptian themed), with a curtain that gets pulled
back and everything, all for about six to ten dollars cheaper (depending on
when you attend) than what you’d pay at one of the reserved seat, luxury
showcases in town, like the Arclight or the Landmark in West Los Angeles.

And
your ticket is likely to be torn by the theater’s manager, Victor Martinez, who
dresses up like the main character of the film he’s showing and always poses
for pictures for before sending you inside. (“Enjoy my movie!”) We’ve been
welcomed by the likes of Rorschach (Watchmen),
Harry Potter, Matt Damon’s astronaut-suited character from The Martian and, most recently, Doctor Strange. Now, that’s entertainment!

**************

I’m grateful that it seems as though “autumn” is finally
settling on Southern California, if only in drips and drops. The clouds are out
in force this morning as I write, always a solid source for inspiration, and
the last few nights I’ve actually been cold when I’ve gone to bed, all the
better for utilizing every bit of cover.

**************

I’m grateful for moments like missing the company of my
eldest daughter, then stepping out into the morning after a movie, as I did
yesterday, to hear music from Nino Rota’s score for The Godfather, music she loves which has only caused it to gain in
significance for me, wafting over the open courtyard of the theater entrance.

**************

I’m grateful after the free-floating disillusionment caused
by the election last week that strangers can and will still talk to each other
on the street. A short conversation I had yesterday with a woman, who did not
look or dress like me or the women in my family, while she played with her
six-month-old baby outside a bookstore in Pasadena, did wonders to restore my
faith in such simple pleasures, and that such simple pleasures were still
possible.

**************

I’m grateful for the return of film critic Jim Emersonas an online presence, if only right now on Facebook. Jim has had
health issues related to his heart and had recently been hospitalized. He’s
home now, convalescing under the care of doctors and his beloved German
shepherd Lolita, and though he’s not had the energy or ability to see many
movies, his political voice has found fire again and his postings on Facebook
have been full of the usual Emersonian clarity, stimulating logic and, as
appropriate, righteous anger and disbelief. Jim has been instrumental in the
development of my own writing and my adventures in critical thinking, and I’m
so glad to be able to read his impressions of the world once again. It may
sound odd, but Jim is probably the best friend I’ve never actually met, and I
hope someday very soon we’ll get to shake hands in 3D.

****************

I’m grateful for the eloquent
understatement of Jeff Nichols’ Loving, one of the three movies I saw yesterday which feel so much like
absolutely vital movies of the moment that the cumulative effect of seeing them
all together left me shaken and overwhelmed. It’s a movie which illustrates,
among many other things, how the gaining of freedoms taken for granted by many
these days was hard-fought, freedoms which might now, despite recent progress,
again be in jeopardy for another long-marginalized community. (More on those other
two in a second.)

Nichols dares to tell the story of Richard and Mildred
Loving, an interracial couple in Virginia who married in 1958 and spent the
next nine years as the subject of persecution and exile before becoming the
nexus of Loving v. Virginia, the 1967
federal ruling that abolished anti-miscegenation laws nationwide, with
spellbinding, hushed confidence. And naturally the movie is being dinged by
some for not being dramatic enough. But there’s enough drama for two or three
movies in the way Ruth Negga, as Mildred, draws a hesitant breath while
reticently considering the family she’ll have to leave to maintain her new one,
or the way Joel Edgerton’s Richard preserves his dignity while furrowing his
brow and deflecting his gaze from figures of authority, stealing a
microsecond’s glance before resuming a position of deference. Loving never sacrifices the integrity of
character for the momentary juice of effect, and despite the seductive call of
the typical Hollywood take on true-life drama, it never becomes about big
moments, or self-righteous expressions, or even the resolution of the courtroom
decision as it is been delivered. I kept thinking how often important stories
like these have been butchered and falsified, their focus and weight shifted
from the real (usually non-white) protagonists to peripheral figures of (white)
authority like savior cops, lawyers and government agents at the hands of
directors like Alan Parker (Mississippi
Burning), and I was made even more grateful for Jeff Nichols’ approach,
which exudes gentleness and a basic honor he recognizes in the characters and
transfers to his film.

**************************

I’m also grateful for the quiet purposefulness of Arrival, which managed to
keep me riveted with a suspenseful tale built not around a laser-blazin’ alien
invasion, but instead a visitation in which the interpretation of language, in
this case one that has never been heard, seen or used by humans before, is the
source of the drama. As one of the characters in the film observes, learning a
foreign language requires your brain to become rewired; it causes you to
rethink the way you see the world and the way you communicate within it. This
has certainly been my experience as I go through the earliest stages of
learning Italian. When you suddenly “understand” the words and the way they
function together in a sentence to suddenly expand meaning and create context,
the experience can be similar to what happens in Arrival; “seeing”/feeling the Italian (or whatever language)
transmogrify into something fluid, like alien text suspended in a smoky
atmosphere, something that can, in a rudimentary way, be understood.

Director
Denis Villeneuve structures his movie as a series of puzzle pieces which build
on each other until we see not what we think we’re seeing, but what actually
is—a mode of experience we weren’t privy to before which, in its own way, resembles
decoding language. This is old-school science fiction based on ideas rather
than sensation, and it’s a visual and philosophical beauty. The movie insists
that words are important, that they do matter, and articulates how the context
in which they are spoken can manipulate, alter and even hinder understanding.
As we go through the looking glass into Trumplandia,

Arrival caused me
to exult in the possibilities of language and simultaneously despair over how
often those possibilities, through misuse and ignorance, can be overwhelmed by
fear or stagnation, or be discarded altogether.

********************

And I’m grateful for the fearless narrative thrust of Paul
Verhoeven’s Elle,the Dutch
director’s first movie in over four years and the first to see an American
release since 2006’s Black Book. The
movie begins with a horrifying sexual assault (heard, but not seen), followed
by the inexplicably matter-of-fact response of the victim, Michele (Isabelle
Huppert in perhaps a career-best performance). Why does she silently sweep up
the broken glass from the floor where the assault took place, and then take a
bath, rather than report the crime? It’s behavior like this that has driven
some viewers to distraction, but even the most inexplicable responses in Elle begin to resonate with
psychological acuity as the details of Michele’s world, and more specifically her
relationships with the men in her life, begin to accumulate. The movie is the
last thing from a position paper—it’s an incredibly tense character thriller
that had me on edge for the entirety of its running time—but once again, with
almost providential timing it serves notice on the squirmy misogynistic
contempt currently moving from a subterranean position to overt expression in
our culture, and how one female response to it might be more complicated than
could easily fit as a slogan on a bumper sticker. Elle certainly means to provoke, but that provocation isn’t
perverse, it’s subtly, artfully pointed, and as such it’s definitely of a piece
within the work of the man who made Starship
Troopers and Showgirls.

*********************

Finally, I am of course grateful for the
apparently bottomless love of my wife, the happiness of my two daughters, the
(sometimes) quiet company of our three cats, and all the cherished people with
whom I have the privilege of interacting every day on social media and in my
non-virtual life. And I am of course grateful to Joe Dante and Charlie Largent
for allowing me free rein in this space each and every week. I do not take any
of this for granted, and I want you all of the above to know how much your
continued presence in my life means to me, my state of mind and my everyday
survival. Happy Thanksgiving.

Saturday, November 05, 2016

From the first time I saw it until
this moment, two days before what might just be the most important, potentially
resonant (for good and ill) American presidential election since the days of
the Civil War, no other movie has expanded in my view more meaningfully, more
ambiguously, with more fascination than has Robert Altman’s Nashville. We often hear of movies which
“transcend” their genres, or their initial ambitions or intentions, and often
built into that alleged transcendence is a condescension to said genre, or
those ambitions or intentions, as if the roots were somehow corrupt or
unworthy, in need of reconstruction. If the form of Nashville transcends anything, it’s the shape and scope of the
multi-character drama as we’d come to know it in 1975, which was dominated at
the time by disaster movies and their jam-packed casts filled with old
Hollywood veterans and Oscar winners. But it doesn’t “transcend” the arena of
political and social commentary so much as attempt to fill in the gaps that
usually accompany such filmmaking endeavors-- movies which can often feel like
treatises tricked out in dramatic dressing-- with artifacts, reminiscences,
instances of exterior image-making and interior conflict, performance, bravado,
anxiety, the sort of breathing room that somehow comes to resemble the real
world.

I used the term “expanded” to describe
my experience with the movie because Nashville’s
vision hasn’t seemed to have left anything about its original context behind in
the past 41 years—it still reverberates, means something in the context of
where we were at as a nation getting ready to celebrate our 200th
anniversary. And yet the film seems to have demonstrated a prescience, an
ability to reach forward, to expand its glancing observational acuity toward an
age that it surely anticipated, where celebrity and politics have become
intertwined in unpredictable and often grotesque ways; where the citizenry has become ever more
divided in the face of national and global shifts that have taken place since
1975 and which continue to occur; which seems, despite the sophistication of technological
innovations like social media, even less inclined toward real community and
communication than ever before.

But even the complex canvas conjured
by Altman, screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury and the marvelous actors which bring Nashville to life hasn’t been able to
fully anticipate the degree to which the American public would become subject
to the cynical manipulation of partisan politics at the hands of politicians,
outsiders as well as those inside the beltway. In 1975 fictional candidate Hal
Phillip Walker, himself most certainly an outsider to Washington beltway
politics, appealed to the everyman intellect in his front-porch approach to
political reasoning:

"Fellow
taxpayers and stockholders in America, on the first Tuesday in November, we
have to make some vital decisions about our management. Let me go directly to
the point. I'm for doing some replacing. I've discussed the Replacement Party
with people all over this country and I'm often confronted with the statement -
'I don't want to get mixed up in politics,' or 'I'm tired of politics,' or 'I'm
not interested.' Almost as often, someone said, 'I can't do anything about it
anyway.' Let me point out two things. Number One: All of us are deeply involved
with politics whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. And
Number Two: We can do something about it. When you pay more for an automobile
than it cost Columbus to make his first voyage to America, that's
politics."

It shouldn’t be too difficult to
remember how such a simplistic rendering of complex issues might have seemed so
attractive to a populace, urban or rural, which had seemingly had its fill of a
political system saturated with systemic racism and violence, one so quick to
exploit a growing generational divide and unembarrassed by its contempt for its
own diverse constituencies, one which had just endured a national crisis, a
presidential implosion and, as the ultimate cynical kiss-off, a pardon by that
president’s ascendant replacement from any criminal responsibility. Who
wouldn’t, on one level or another, have been for some replacing?

And Walker’s campaign, gathering steam
in small steps in the summer of 1975, its collective eyes on the big contest to
come a year later, seems to have been at least initially underestimated. Listen
to ABC news anchor and political commentator Howard K. Smith, in the hours just
before what will turn out to be a horrifying watershed moment in the Walker
campaign, summarize the Walker effect and reflect in a way that, in retrospect,
knowing what we know about presidential politics in 2016, can only now seem
terribly, quaintly insufficient in its self-satisfaction:

"Little more than a year ago, a man named Hal Phillip
Walker excited a group of college students with some questions-- "Have you
stood on a high and windy hill and heard the acorns drop and roll? Have you
walked in the valley beside the brook, walked alone and remembered? Does
Christmas smell like oranges to you?" Within a commencement speech, such
questions were fitting, perhaps, but hardly the material with which to launch a
presidential campaign. Even those who pay close attention to politics probably
saw Hal Phillip Walker and his Replacement Party as a bit of frost on the
hillside. Summer, if not late spring, would surely do away with all that. Well,
now that summer, along with presidential primaries, is heavy upon us and the
frost is still there, perhaps we should take a closer look. Hal Phillip Walker
is, in a way, a mystery man. Out of nowhere with a handful of students and
scarcely any pros, he's managed to win three presidential primaries and is
given a fighting chance to take a fourth-- Tennessee. A win in that state would
take on added significance, for only once in the last 50 years has Tennessee
failed to vote for the winning presidential candidate. No doubt many Americans,
especially party-liners, wish that Hal Phillip Walker would go away, disappear
like the natural frost and come again at some more convenient season. But
wherever he may be going, it seems sure that Hal Phillip Walker is not going
away. For there is genuine appeal, and it must be related to the raw courage of
this man. Running for President, willing to battle vast oil companies,
eliminate subsidies to farmers, tax churches, abolish the Electoral College,
change the National Anthem and remove lawyers from government-- especially from
Congress. Well, at this point, it would be wise to say most of us don't know
the answer to Hal Phillip Walker. But to answer one of his questions, as a
matter of fact, Christmas has always smelled like oranges to me."

Yet in 2016 the man whose image and
impact seemed to most accurately reflect the unpretentious impertinence of Hal
Phillip Walker, H. Ross Perot, the wealthy businessman who mounted an
influential, if still unsuccessful, bid for the presidency in 1992, seems
almost like a distant memory. (Almost.) Like Walker, Perot hailed from
the South and had a penchant for boiling down complex issues into
sound-bite-sized “solutions” that could appeal to those voters whose attention
to the wonky minutiae of political logic and practicality was as deficient as
his own. “I’ve got a lot of experience in not taking 10 years to solve a
10-minute problem,” Perot said during one debate during his campaign.

If Perot’s cut-to-the-chase
braggadocio sounds familiar it should, echoing as it does from the fictional
past of Altman’s movie all the way through to the unexpected steamrolling of
the American political process at the (some would say tiny; many people are saying
it) hands of Donald Trump.

However, the folksy pretense to honesty which links
Walker to Perot is inapplicable to Trump. Yes, the same sorts of appeals to his
base and potential voters are being made by this year’s Perot, but the key
element absent is any sense that Trump, like Walker or Perot, is really “one of
us.” The trappings of glamour, wealth, urbanity and grotesque excess that have
characterized Trump’s public life, long before he became interested in a
presidential candidacy, are many times removed from Walker’s assumed of-the-people
stature. We can only guess, given the lack of information in the movie itself,
as to Walker’s personal financial holdings, but certainly Perot’s own status as
a rich mover-and-shaker was only enhanced by his own inescapable persona as a
straight-shooting Texan. Trump has, improbably, extended his appeal to the very
sort of voting base who might previously, as in the case of Perot and certainly
in the case of Walker, and perhaps in a moment characterized by more clarity
and less purposely fomented outrage, have found the self-aggrandizing real
estate mogul irredeemably suspect.

Nashville is fascinating not only for what
it told us, and continues to tell us, about the way American politics have been
altered, the way the idealism of the ‘60s was assassinated and replaced by
overwhelming political opportunism, hued by language delivered in familiar
cadences and wrapped in the facile trappings of patriotism. It’s also pertinent
and enriched by its concern for the people who make lives amid the exuberant
chaos of the American landscape, who are indeed often the source of that chaos,
who revel not only in the insanity and sometimes unforgiving indifference of
that landscape, but also in a measure of hopefulness to which every citizen
can, or should be able to lay claim.

Of all of Nashville’s celebrated 24 characters,
all of whom dart in and out at one time or another from the periphery and into
the center of the action captured by Altman’s camera, the one I’ve been
thinking about a lot in these days before the 2016 election is the one that in
some ways seems the most peripheral, the woman known only as Albuquerque,
played by Barbara Harris. Albuquerque, as hinted at by the name she calls
herself, is certainly an outsider to Nashville, but also to the city’s music
scene, which she hopes in some way to penetrate on the way toward the sort of
career embodied by singers like Barbara Jean and Connie White, women with whom
she will share some very significant space over the course of the three days
depicted in the film. She’s traveled to Nashville with her husband, Star (Bert
Remsen), but somewhere along the way Star has grown impatient with Albuquerque’s
relentless fantasies of country music fame and fortune, so much so that Albuquerque
has made a break from him and spends the duration of the film trying to avoid
being caught by him and dragged back home.

She chatters on about
her talent and her desires to anyone who will listen. Unfortunately for her,
not too many seem to be interested in listening, so caught up are they in the
swirl of their own concerns and interests. She weaves among the cacophonic ambience
of Altman’s portraiture of Nashville’s busy world, invaded as it has been by
the Walker campaign and its hangers-on. At one point, self-absorbed as always, Albuquerque
stumbles across a highway, indifferent to and completely unaware of the traffic
accident she has inadvertently caused. While cars crash together behind her and
Walker campaign staffers, decked out in red-white-and-blue decorated straw
hats, scramble to assist the possibly injured drivers, Albuquerque dithers on.
She may be unaware of the chaos surrounding her, some of which she herself sets
in motion, but it’s clear that on some level, conscious or otherwise, she
thrives on it, which makes her a perfect drifter to navigate, on our behalf, the
whims of the wind, to say nothing of the compressed and readily unleashed
energy and opportunism floating through Altman's musical city.

And wherever the talent
and the audiences gather, the observant viewer will catch glimpses of Albuquerque
perched just off stage, or milling around backstage without permission, soaking
up the milieu, hoping some of the good luck that has graced the performers she
sees in the positions of prominence they enjoy will somehow be also visited
upon her. But in the same way she seems to be able to slip out of the grasp of
her pursuant husband, that lucky break seems to elude Albuquerque at most every
turn. She can’t even seem to crack the open mic at a club which sets up the
spunky charm of a duo like the Smoky Mountain Laurels against the tone-deaf
warbling of another would-be star, Sueleen Gay (Gwen Welles).

And the one gig where we
do see Albuquerque on stage isn’t exactly a dream venue. One of my favorite
sequences in Nashville is the one
which contrasts the various Sunday worship services attended by some of the
characters-- the sober formalism of the Catholic mass attended by Wade (Robert
DoQui) and Star (Bert Remsen), and Miss Pearl (Barbara Baxley) with head
covering that looks more like a doily-- Sueleen is there too, wearing a fuller
mantilla, singing in the choir where she and her musical abilities are finally
afforded a modicum of grace; the Presbyterian service where Del (Ned Beatty)
brings his kids, a big, ornate Protestant service befitting the mainstream of
the Nashville religious community (there's even a sign language interpreter for
the benefit of the many deaf worshipers, the Reese children among
them) which sees country star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) in choral robes,
yet no less pompous in this sacred mode-- like everywhere else, he's there
primarily to be seen; Linnea sings with the gospel choir (presumably the one
she's seen with at the opening of the film) at a black church-- Tommy Brown
(Timothy Brown) is also there-- where the choir provides the background setting
for a baptism; and finally, Barbara Jean, seated in a wheelchair at the front
of the modest hospital chapel, engaged in a heartrending rendition of "In
The Garden" ("Well, He walks with me and He talks with me/And He
tells me I am his own...") while her husband Barnett (Allen Garfield),
Pvt. Glenn Kelly (Scott Glenn) and Mr. Green (Keenan Wynn) listen intently.

In immediate contrast to
the reverent observance on display in the church sequence, Albuquerque is next
seen singing at a car race, to a “congregation” whose lack of receptivity to
her message can at least be blamed on the screaming wheels and grinding gears
of the culture at large, and not just spiritual vacuity or, perhaps more
generously, the potentially hollow habits of worship. But the thing that makes Albuquerque
stand out amidst the madness, regardless of whether or not she can actually be
heard, and regardless of whether or not she can even sing, is that Albuquerque
gives the opportunity and the performance her all. After all, this is, she
thinks, her one moment to shine.

As Nashville moves toward its conclusion, the focus shifts to a Hal
Phillip Walker rally at the Parthenon, a replica of the ancient Greek structure
which stands as the centerpiece of the city’s Centennial Park, the event for
which John Triplette (Michael Murphy) has spent the duration of the film
relentlessly courting and recruiting the elite among Nashville’s country music
stars, including Connie White, Tommy Brown, Haven Hamilton and Barbara Jean.
Throughout the film we’ve had glimpses of Kenny Frasier (David Hayward, also seen above with Barbara Harris). Like
Albuquerque, Kenny is another outsider, a quiet, socially reticent fellow who
creeps through the movie, fiddle case in hand, as if looking for a gig he’s
already sure he’s unqualified for. But he doesn’t seem to be a musician, and
unlike Albuquerque, he makes no attempt to ingratiate himself within the
community of musicians and entertainers. He seems to have an interest in
Barbara Jean, but his true motivations remain unspoken. And there he is, near
front and center in the audience.

Among all those gathered
at the Parthenon on stage waiting for the rally to start, there seems to be a
certain unease. Musicians and Walker representatives mill about the stage, yet
the only person we see exhibiting any sense of seeming natural and in her
element is Albuquerque. How she got there is anyone’s guess, presumably
slipping in under the relaxed radar of Walker security, but there she sits,
poised like the family cat at the feet of other performers like Sueleen Gay
(how did she get there?) and that
gospel choir, waiting for a crack at the door, another possible moment.

Those who have seen Nashville know that for Albuquerque her
moment does indeed come—she finds herself leading a stunned assembly in a
seemingly endless chorus of the movie’s signature anthem of blinkered optimism,
“It Don’t Worry Me,” after seizing the stage in the aftermath of a horrifying
occurrence which seems like nothing if not an unwelcome echo of the senseless
political violence of the ‘60s lurching its way into newer, unplowed ground. Screenwriter
Matthew Wilder recently wrote that, as Altman’s camera slowly pulls back from
this scene and tilts to the sky, it feels like nothing less than the director
raising his gaze to heaven in disbelief. And indeed, Altman ends Nashville on a note that is exquisitely
difficult to pin down, one of the most gloriously ambiguous refrains in the
history of American movies, at once chilling, exhilarating, cynical, defiant
and sanguine, yet laced with resignation and apprehension.

Which makes it the
perfect film to encapsulate the strange brew of corruption, racism,
malfeasance, boorish sexism and general upending of decorum and tradition that
marks this weirdest of all political seasons. However Nashville ends up reflecting back on the era we’re about to usher
in, if the descendants of Hal Phillip Walker have their day or if the
Albuquerques adrift at sea in the American political system can seize their
moment and make what they can of it, obviously no one can yet say. But as vital
as this singular artistic achievement has remained over the course of 41 increasingly
tumultuous years, I suspect it might just find some way to sing a uniquely
American tune to those who have ears to hear. That, at least, don’t worry me.